Three Lessons We Can Learn from Virgance

by Nathaniel Whittemore · 2009-02-12 13:04:00 UTC
Topics:

Virgance uses a Unicorn (what else?) to attract new employees


Yesterday, social startup Virgance announced via Twitter that they had received funding. TechCrunch also wrote a great post about their model and early success. The big idea behind Virgance is to find campaigns that harness collective power in new ways and scale the most promising models. They've got a number of ongoing projects launched, including Carrotmob which harnesses collective buying power to reward businesses that do good, and 1BOG which helps neighborhoods reduce the cost of going solar by joining forces.

To celebrate, I thought it would be fun to write up three lessons I think social entrepreneurs can learn from Virgance:

  1. Hire Awesome: The Virgance folks are supremely concerned with building a team of absolutely the best people. As the TechCrunch story notes, they attract entrepreneurial types by giving them big creative portfolios and nurturing their independence. They recognize that many of their staff will leave in a few years to start their own companies. The importance that they place on team is something I think we can all learn from.

  2. Plan for Failure: Virgance relates their model to the video game industry, where a company will launch 10-20 products a year and just need 1 or 2 to really take off to turn a profit. How well this works with social campaigns is yet to be seen, but the larger point is that they're actually structuring failure into their model. We learn by flopping and picking ourselves up, right? Sasha Dichter wrote a great post on innovation the other day where he quoted Randy Nelson of Pixar University: “The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance.”

  3. Have Fun: Virgance is a fun-loving company. They're named after a term from Star Wars. They make promo videos where they dance in liquor stores. And their most recent hiring advertisement has a freakin' Unicorn in it. Changing the world is serious business, but changing the world with friends is one of the most rewarding and fun things anyone can do. Its great to see a company that gets it.

Nathaniel Whittemore is the founder of Assetmap. Previously he was the founding director of the Northwestern University Center for Global Engagement.
PREVIOUS STORY:
Pragmatism's Discontents: What Social Entrepreneurs Can Learn from Abraham Lincoln
NEXT STORY:
Facing Forward: The End of the Social Entrepreneurship Blog on Change.org

COMMENTS (0)

    Comment Policy

    · All fields are required to comment.

    [X]

    Comments on Change.org are meant for further exploration and evaluation of the campaign on Change.org. To that end, we welcome constructive comments. However, we reserve the right to delete comments which, as determined solely in our discretion: (1) are offensive, abusive, or off-topic; (2) include content solely intended to personally attack the campaign creator, (3) are designed to subvert or hijack comment threads rather than contribute to them; and/or (4) violate our terms of service and/or privacy policy. Repeat offenders may be permanently removed from the site at our discretion. Please also be advised that: (A) we do not actively curate and/or monitor in any manner whatsoever the comments made on the Change.org platform, and (B) the creator of each campaign on Change.org may remove any comment at her/his/its discretion.